Formerly ilovehowyouletmefall (which is still my AO3 handle) My name is Marissa, and I'm a millenial communist from Canada. This is the one place on the internet where I can be an unprofessional idiot, but feel free to talk politics with me if you want. Currently Arcane-obsessed, please talk to me about Arcane. Season 2 defender, shipper of meljayvik and all iterations contained therein. This was a Destiel blog first, and will be a Destiel blog again. CasGirl till I die. My first love is BtVS, and I'm apt to cry over Giles/Jenny. Check out my fanfic.
Specifically posts about Arcane and duality are here.
A list of posts about the s2 music videos
I'm on AO3 as ilovehowyouletmefall
And this is a very abbreviated list of things I've written. There's more, both on AO3 and in my "my stuff" tag. But brief highlights:
For SPN
Ignite your bones
COMPLETE. Chuck takes the Winchesters up on their offer in 15x19. Dean kills Sam. Cas gets brought back. Dean, Cas, and Jack deal with the emotional fallout.
I said show me something
THE toxic deancas post-15x19 fix-it PWP with feelings. Dean and Castiel are both unwell in the head, but they somehow end up in the right place anyways. It's fun.
NOW WITH A SEQUEL: Forget your perfect offering.
The sequel is very much not a PWP (Though there is quite a bit of sex). It's multi-chapter, about Castiel trying to rebuild Heaven with the resurrected angels, and Cas and Dean building their relationship while still being unwell about each other. There is so much that is fun about this fic, it's kind of hard to describe, I would just really, really suggest that you read it.
Life Skills
Season 9, no Gadreel, Cas in the bunker. Dean takes it upon himself to teach Cas how to be human. You know the stupid way Dean and Cas look at each other in s9? The fic is about that. That vibe. AND about Dean having hangups around masculinity. AND about Dean sharing his favourite things with Cas. Including sex.
Full of Grace
~7k words of feelings, followed by ~3k words of tentacle porn. But the tentacle porn is played for body horror. And the body horror is played for emotional affirmation.
And for BTVS
This Isn't A Kingdom
THE Giles/Jenny wishverse fic. It's got everything: action, flirting, teamwork, angst, sex. My greatest cultural contribution. Put this one on my gravestone when I die.
Trust
If you were a Giles/Jenny fan in the mid-to-late 2000s, you might remember a WIP fic where Giles and Jenny met in London 12 years before Sunnydale. You might remember it being left on a cliffhanger in 2007. WELL GUESS WHO FINISHED IT IN THE YEAR 2020.
"Giles is an image of Englishness that owes its status to cultural representations from the Victorian period through to Second World War films and up to icons such as James Bond. He is intelligent, well-mannered, courageous but not unduly violent, thoughtful and witty" (109).
~ Pateman, Matthew. "'You Say Tomato' Englishness in Buffy the Vampire Slayer," Cercles 8 (2003): 103-113
When defining Giles’ character, the most common tendency is to define him in relation to the Scoobies. This is what leads to the propagation of misconceptions such as "Giles is an authority figure," or "Giles is the Scoobies' father figure." Due to his age and his role as Buffy’s mentor, Giles is often automatically slotted into the role of “father of the group” and loaded with all sorts of traits that stereotypically go along with that paternal role, but don’t necessarily apply to him, or, at least, are not major components of his character. The above quotation, from an article on representations of Englishness in Buffy, is somewhat unique because it defines Giles not in relation to the rest of the Scoobies, but in terms of his Englishness. It is still looking at the character from a particular angle, but it is closer to an assessment of him on his own terms, which is why it is more accurate than many definitions, and why I am taking it as my starting point. Pateman’s association of Giles with the Victorian period (earlier in the article he also writes, “Giles might be thought in some ways to reflect and trade upon a… Victorian version of Englishness” [107]) is what I particularly find interesting, because it agrees with what I consider to be really the essence of Giles’s character.
The Victorian era was one of great change, in which modernity often came into conflict with tradition (which is itself an interesting way to regard Giles’ character, but not what I consider essential to him), but in terms of literature and art it was largely continuous with the Romantic era. Despite the period’s rational, stiff-upper-lip pretenses, the Victorians were concerned with writing about emotion, mythology and folklore, beauty and a search for ideals. In “The Dark Age” (BtVS 2.8) we learn that Giles’ favourite author is E. M. Forster (the script actually says “Forrester” but The Annotated Buffy concludes, and I agree, that that’s a mistake), a popular writer of the Romantic genre. His best known work is probably A Room With a View (made into a film by Merchant-Ivory starring Helena Bonham Carter), in which a major theme is love and passion overcoming emotional repression and social restrictions. Jenny Calendar describes the particular book in question as “so romantic,” and that is what I consider Giles to essentially be: at heart a Romantic.
***This is an essay I wrote on LiveJournal in freaking 2007. I wanted to bring it over here, because I still think Giles' Romanticism/idealism is a major component of his character that doesn't get acknowledged nearly enough. Continued under the cut. I've edited it only very slightly.***
Even before Joss decided to give Giles a past at odds with his all-too-proper image, Romantic ideals were informing his character. From the very beginning his enthusiasm for his job reflects his attraction to a mystical world of heroes and monsters, rather in the same way Romantics and Victorians were attracted to folklore and inclined towards medievalism. Of course, in Giles' case, he does live in a mystical world of heroes and monsters; the romance of it is in the fact that (unlike Buffy) he gets excited about it. He emphasizes the mystical aspects of the Slayer’s power, telling Buffy she should be able to “sense” vampires’ presence, while she takes the much more practical approach of picking them out by their outdated fashion sense (BtVS 1.1). At the end of “The Harvest” (BtVS 1.2) Giles informs the Scoobies that “The next threat we face may be something quite different [than vampires]… We're at the center of a mystical convergence here. We may, in fact, stand between the Earth and its total destruction.” Buffy replies sarcastically “I can hardly wait!” but you can tell from his eager tone that Giles genuinely can hardly wait for their next adventure. While Buffy undercuts her mission, Giles romanticizes it. Set in opposition to the post-modern outlook of Buffy and her friends, Giles embodies the older ethos of Romanticism.
Giles' Romanticism comes through at other key moments as well. It's the Romantic in him that approves of Buffy and Angel's relationship. Though he admits that it verges into the maudlin, it's easy to see that the poeticness of "a vampire in love with a Slayer" appeals to Giles (BtVS 1.11). In "Innocence" (2.14) when Buffy is expecting Giles to be disappointed in her, he instead emphasizes that the important thing is that she and Angel really loved each other. It's the Romantic ideal of true love that he values. And what could be more Romantic than his reaction to Jenny's murder? He goes on a kamikaze mission to avenge her and bring down the world around him in flames (BtVS 2.17).
Less significant moments are evidence of a Romantic nature as well. Giles' thoughts on dramatic irony and predestination in "Graduation II" (3.22), his whimsical costumes in "Fear Itself" (4.04) and "No Place Like Home" (5.05), and the notion that Spike might be meant for "a higher purpose" in "The 'I' In Team" (4.13) all indicate an inclination towards romantic fancy and, in the latter case, idealism.
In fact, all of the major moments of Giles' character development can be understood in terms of Romanticism and/or idealism. Ten-year old Giles wanted to be a fighter-pilot (BtVS 1.05). He wanted to be a hero, and not just a hero -- a pilot, probably the most romantic kind of war hero there is. Dropping out from university and going to London was itself a Romantic rebellion against the suffocating system in the name of freedom, independence and individuality. He was living the anti-hero ideal, being the rebel without a cause. With Randal's death he became disenchanted with that particular romantic image and returned to the Council where his attraction to the mystical and the heroic appeal of fighting the forces of darkness led him to become the enthusiastic Watcher we met in Season 1. I've already used extensive examples of Giles' Romanticism at work throughout Seasons 1 and 2. In Season 3 he breaks with the Watcher's Council for valuing the emotional and the personal over the logical and abstract; for essentially privledging Romantic ideals over Modern ones (BtVS 3.12)
Up to this point Giles' idealism was always closely tied to the role he defined himself by. He aimed to be the ideal fighter pilot, the ideal rebel, the ideal Watcher. In Season 4 he is at loose ends. His dream in "Restless" (4.22) illustrates how he doesn't know who he is or how to define himself. He doesn't know what to aim for. At the end of his dream Giles discovers that ultimately he defines himself as a Watcher. But he doesn't get the opportunity to reaffirm his identity until a few months later, at the beginning of Season 5.
When Buffy asks him to be her Watcher again he latches on to that role as he never had before. Romatic ideals are bundled in to his conception of his work, but now he's projecting them on to Buffy so that she becomes his Romantic ideal. The opening scene of "The Real Me" (5.02) illustrates this shift in Buffy and Giles' relationship: Buffy balances on a pedestal as Giles paces around her at a distance. More than ever before she is the centre of his world, and by the end of the season he comes to figuratively put her on a pedestal and admire her as a hero from afar. At the end of the season Giles tells Buffy that he's proud of her for "Being able to place [her] heart above all else" (BtVS 5.20). Again, he values emotion. Though he later falls out with Buffy over the issue of killing Dawn, if what he said earlier about admiring Buffy's ability "to place her heart above all else" is true, he must not judge her harshly for prioritizing her sister's life. In his exchange with Ben in "The Gift" (5.22) Giles acknowledges that Buffy could never take a human life, and he idealizes her for it. "She's a hero, you see. She's not like us," he says, setting Buffy apart from himself, who he knows is capable of murder, and Ben, who for all he knows is an innocent. He identifies Buffy as a higher sort of being all together. His elevated perception of her is likely strengthened even more by her sacrifice.
Giles' murder of Ben also marks an important ideological turn in his character. As stated earlier, ten-year-old Giles wanted to be a hero; in "Welcome to the Hellmouth" Giles was psyched to be "stand[ing] between the Earth and its total destruction," i.e. about being a hero; in "Prophecy Girl" he wants to leave the safety of his library and go be a hero. The heroic ideal was an integral part of Giles' character and Romantic ideology, but by the end of Season 5 he has given up on it. Giles' final conclusion that he is not a hero, I would conjecture, is probably the result of a slow-burning realization that began with Jenny's murder, and was reinforced by his failure to find Buffy the summer she went away, his role in the Cruciamentum, and his year of uselessness Season 4. Giles stops trying to live up to his ideals, but he doesn't stop being an idealist -- he transplants his heroic ideals onto Buffy, which feeds into his idolization of her.
Moving now into the realm of complete conjecture, I would argue that Giles' view of Buffy as a hero, and of himself as a failure to be a hero, may have played in to his decision to leave her in Season 6. If Buffy is the kind of hero Giles imagined her to be -- and no doubt he built her up even more in his mind after her death -- then she would have had no use for him anyways. She should have been completely capable of standing on her own (as all classical heroes do). It may have even been that, on a subconscious level, Giles didn't like to see the all-too-human and broken Buffy that returned from the grave, and preferred to leave so as to keep his idealized vision of her intact. With his reaction to the deluge of bad news that greets him on his return to Sunnydale in "Grave" (6.22), in addition to the morbid absurdity of the situation, Giles may have been laughing at his own naivety in forgetting that Buffy is, after all, only human.
If this is the case, some of Giles' behaviour season 7 starts to make sense. If he had stopped believing in both his own and Buffy's ability to live up to the ideals he once valued so highly, it makes sense that he may start acting rather Machiavellian, as he does in "Lies My Parents Told Me." I'm not going to go to the trouble of explaining Season 7 Giles, however, since it was a huge mess.
So, there you go. That's how I understand Gile's character. I don't think I can overstate how important I think Romanticism and idealism are to his character and his motivation.
Your affection for your charge has rendered you incapable of clear and impartial judgement. You have a father’s love for the child, and that is useless to the cause.
